burnout
by BleedingUmbra
Summary: when she burns out, she'll drag him with her. dark, explicit Clato modern/drug AU - M for a reason.


burnout.

_you have a light?_ he asks, one eyebrow arched, holding a cigarette in tanned fingers. her eyes slide up his massive form and settle on his sky-tinted irises. _i don't like fire much_ is her reply in a voice cold, hard, and silver as her eyes. he's surprised at the poisonous edge that comes from the full lips of the petite girl, and decides that she'd be a good fuck. _what's your name?_ she tilts her pale, sharply angled face up toward him, _you ask too many questions._ his brow furrows and he thinks that maybe she's not worth the effort, after all. that's when one corner of her mouth turns up in a wicked smirk, and her eyes flick up and down him once more, and then she's as blunt as she is sharp. _wanna fuck?_

it's only a few minutes later that they're in some bar's bathroom, their clothes shed on the grimy tile floor. she's painfully thin, her bones struggling to burst from her paper skin, bruises and scars and cuts and dirt all layered over her limbs and body, and he hesitates. she looks fragile, like he could snap her in half with his bare hands, and he thinks she looks more dead than alive, but then she pulls him close and their lips, his hot and soft, hers cold and chapped, meet in a clash of teeth and tongues. he tastes blood and he knows that this won't be gentle, that she needs it not to be gentle. when he thrusts into her, her nails and teeth draw blood from him, and his instinct to dominate her rises. he crushes her against the wall and claims her.

she's disappeared by the time he's caught his breath. he finds himself surprisingly disappointed when realizes that the small streaks of blood they've left on the filthy walls of the room are the only traces that will remain of the girl. that's when he sees the glint of metal, and picks up a necklace that vaguely recalls seeing on her before they lost themselves in blood and sweat and sex. he stars at the three interlocking rings on the chain for a moment before shoving the piece of jewelry in his pocket, a smirk growing on his face as he exits the bathroom.

_i have something of yours_, he breathes into her ear. she slowly sets her drink - vodka, he thinks - on the bar and turns to face him. she doesn't seem surprised that he's here. _and what would that be? _he reaches around her neck and clasps the necklace. the metal circles glisten sickly against her deathly white flesh, and she reaches a hand up, small fingers with sharpened nails caressing the silver. she doesn't thank him, and he doesn't expect her to. they fuck again that night.

they meet each other once a week. it always begins with smooth words in conversations too short and too sharp to be called conversations. it always ends with blood and bruises blossoming on their skin and the scent of sweat and of sex in the air. they become the closest thing they can have to friends.

eventually, he gets her to try smoking. she dislikes it at first, but after his perpetual nagging, as she calls it, she begins to smoke regularly. they drink and smoke and fuck for a month before she gives him his first shot of heroin. he loves it and she refuses to give him any more. she won't even tell him why.

she takes him home one night, and he discovers she lives in an apartment complex, in room hardly bigger than a closet with a tiny, broken bed and fucks the owner of the complex to keep the place. she spends all the money she gets from stealing and selling herself on vodka and heroin. he insists she comes to live with him. his place is hardly any better, just a side room in an old lady's flat, but he doesn't have to fuck to stay here, only help the old woman with chores once a week, and it's in a better part of town.

after two weeks, she moves back to her old place because she doesn't want him to think that what they do implies that she feels anything for him. her silver gaze won't meet his ice-blue eyes, and her fingernails cut into her own skin as she tells him this. they both know that they're in too far.

somewhere between the drinking and the smoking and the fucking, he fell in love. he thinks she knows it, too.

they keep their routine up, but she never stays after they fuck - though it's not like she did before - and she says less and is far rougher. he begins to worry about her for the first time when she loses fifteen pounds in a week - fifteen pounds that she should have been too thin to lose - and he sees finger-shaped bruises on her hips and breasts and arms and neck and gashes open on her wrists and legs and the needle marks on her arms grow far more numerous and the silver necklace she always wore vanishes.

he asks her what's wrong the next time they meet, but she grinds against him and begins to kiss him. he loses his train of thought for several minutes, but when he regains it he pulls her up from where she kneels between his legs, as much as he hates himself for it in the moment, and asks her again. she begins to shake, and he can see the eruption coming moments before it hits. she screams, a high, grating, piercing sound of agony that makes him want to cover his ears, curl up in a ball, and cry. the scream lasts longer than he thinks possible, and only ends when she chokes and begins coughing blood. she collapses, but he catches her and holds her. she doesn't cry - he doesn't think she's capable of it, anymore - but she begins to laugh hysterically. when she's finished with this outburst, she falls silent for several minutes before finally breathing _i'm burning_._ every fucking moment of every fucking day, i'm burning. it sits inside me and it devours me and i need to put the fire out._ she spends the rest of the night talking about fire.

he's not really sure why she's burning and he gathers that she doesn't know, either. he thinks maybe it's the reason she drinks and smokes and fucks and cuts and shoots up. she's killing herself to try and drown the inferno that is raging inside her. _maybe we can get help_, he tells her. she claws his face, leaving bloody furrows in his cheek, and screams at him for the suggestion until she passes out.

when she wakes up, she is gasping, her fingers scratching at her arms, her eyes glassy, and her breathing erratic. he gets the syringe of heroin she needs so badly from her pocket and gives her the drug himself - he's pretty sure she wouldn't even be able to find a vein in her state. he feels bad for giving her more of the poison that she craves, but he can't stand to see her in the agony of withdrawal. he wants to do whatever he can to keep her from pain, no matter what the consequences. he doesn't realize that the consequences are worse than the pain.

a few days later she comes to him, her hands shaking, and his world shakes with two words from her.

_this can't be happening. no. no. you're wrong. you're fucking wrong! wait, you're fucking lying! are you trying to get money from me or something, you whore? why the fuck would you lie to me? haven't i been good to you, you bitch? get the fuck out of here and don't fucking come back until you've taken care of that leech inside you, cunt. _

he knows the instant he starts ranting that he's hurting her worse than anything has ever hurt her before, but he can't stop himself. he's not ready for this. he can't do this. he can't have a child. he's always been afraid of ending up like his own father did, and he realizes now that he's just like the man he hated so much. the worst part of it all, he thinks, is that she didn't cry and she didn't yell. instead, she just stood there, looking like a ghost, skin almost clear, eyes staring, and then turned and ran away.

hours later, he know that he needs to find her, that he needs to make this right. he runs as fast as he can and doesn't stop to knock at the door, only bursts into her closet of an apartment, and his vision fills with red at the sight awaiting him. she is on the bed, lying limp and unmoving and empty, but she's not empty enough as filthy man he knows she's probably not said a word to or ever seen before hangs above her, thrusting in and out of her, grunting and groaning. he thinks the man sounds like a pig, and this thought barely registers before he takes the two steps to the bed and hurls the man off her onto the floor. he's kicking, punching, choking the man as scarlet screams in his vision and before he realizes it the man is no longer a man but a misshapen corpse beneath him. she's sitting, knees to her chest and arms clasped before her shins, on the bed, watching him with distant eyes. he knows she fucks people - lots of people - for money regardless of gender or age or status, but it's never been quite so personal; he's never had to see it. and now he's breathing hard, the fury still coursing through him, so he pulls her to him and kisses her like he's never kissed her before. then they fuck there like they've never fucked before, with a fetus in her body and a dead man watching them from the floor with his pants still down around his ankles. _at least he'll never be able to get hard again_, he says when they're done. _i think that's the least of his worries right now_, she replies, a smirk on her face but emptiness in her eyes.

she slices the body into pieces, taking her time to carve patterns that somehow she finds pretty, not sickening as he does, into the flesh. she takes special care to chop up the genitals of the pig. he scatters the corpse's mutilated, diced remains into sewers and rivers and dumpsters in a twenty mile radius. she says that no one will miss the animal of a man that he beat to death, but he wants to make sure. he doesn't want to be taken away from her, especially not now. he thinks she'll need him more than ever.

a month later, she's just starting to show, with a small bump developing upon her skeletal figure. and then she overdoses on her beloved heroin and falls unconscious and when she opens her eyes, he's holding her and there's so much blood and she screams her pain and her hatred until she passes out once again.

somewhere between the time he rejected her for being pregnant and the time she loses the baby, she starts to slip away. the only time she can function is when her veins are flooded with heroine or when she's too drunk to think. he doesn't want to know how she's getting the money to pay for the bottles and bottles of vodka, the packs upon packs of cigarettes, and especially the amount of heroin she's been using, but he thinks he does know how. the bruises on her body have multiplied, and she's losing weight again. she's dying. the doses of heroin she's taking are high enough to be fatal, and they keep getting larger. she's lost herself and he's losing her and he doesn't think he can survive losing her because she's the only thing he lives for anymore.

and one day, he can't stand to watch her plunging the needles into her skin - she doesn't even waste the time it takes to search for an operable vein anymore, since they're all collapsing anyway. he kisses her, a lingering kiss, softer than anything they've ever shared before, and he doesn't think she recognizes him through her haze of drugs and drink and nicotine. he presses his lips to her cold forehead a final time, then leaves. he needs to go on a walk, a long walk, and clear his mind. the air stings his lungs like knives - the thought of knives briefly conjures images of her cleaving chunks of flesh from a corpse - and he realizes the only oxygen he's used to is air that's already been laced with nicotine smoke and heavy with the scent of sex and blood. he's still out on his walk when she overdoses.

the fire is devouring her, and she can't contain it within her porcelain bones and paper flesh anymore. the pain is so breathtaking she sees it in a blinding rainbow of brilliant light and hears it in a terrible, unending shriek that she thinks might be coming from her throat, and she tastes it hot and thick and warm and metallic in her mouth, and she's choking and she's burning and darkness is invading her vision andthen she's going, going, gone.

he hears the sirens and he sees the lights and he can't breathe. he's running as fast as he can and he thinks someone is trying to hold him back but then he's in the alley and he sees her silver eyes like knives and her black hair like shadow and her bones like mountains and her flesh like glass and he's screaming and fighting away restraining hands and he's by her side. he tastes bile and blood as he pulls her into him but he knows she's too far away already and then he falls into the darkness that is waiting to consume him.

white lights and white walls and white coats await him when he opens his eyes. fury floods him, hot and burning and crimson, because _she's gone_ and _they didn't save her _and he almost vomits at the taste of the lies he's telling himself, but he'd rather lie to himself than accept that he didn't try to save her when he still could. fire floods his body and he rips the needles from his arm and bursts from the room, vision blurry and head pounding and body burning. he's out the doors before they can stop him and he doesn't stop running until he's far enough away that they'll never find him.

it wasn't the overdose that killed her, and he knows it. he saw the look in her dead eyes and knows that the fire she told him about so long ago finally overwhelmed her. the overdose paralyzed her and trapped her. the flames consumed her.

he hitchhikes and walks across the country, but he can't run far enough away to escape her. he thinks for the first time that maybe she was the one who claimed him in that filth-filled bathroom an eternity ago. day and night and week and month pass in blurs that could be an infinity or an instant to his fevered mind, blazing with thoughts sharp and slow and agonizing. he tries to drown the fire in his veins with syringes of diacetylmorphine - he starts it now because she never let him, never wanted it to destroy him the way it ruined her - but it only turns the flames into lava, brilliant and pulsing and searing. he tries to put out the fire in his muscles with bottles of alcohol, but the flames only feed off the liquid, encompassing his being with an inferno that rages and flows and consumes. this is the fire that she tried to explain to him, he realizes, and he thinks the flames moved from her into him when he held her body that night.

once, time had blurred before him, weeks passing before he even comprehended that an hour had gone by. now, every second draws itself out, clinging with burning claws to his pores before slipping into the past. the fire is building within him, and he is in agony every moment. he thinks, maybe, that this is how she felt. in his heart, he knows that what she felt was far worse. he knows that she died long before her body, that she was murdered by the drugs and the drink and the sex and most of all by her own mind.

he starts to see her when his veins are full of so much heroin he can't see straight. he hears her in his drunken stupors and feels her silver gaze when he's fucking strangers, men and women for money and to forget. he never even realizes that everyone he fucks has dark hair (that can never quite match the darkness trapped in hers) and grey eyes (that are never quite the right shade of silver, never like moonbeams and knife blades) and pale skin (that is never quite thin enough or cold enough or deathly enough).

it's only months later that he realizes that he can never forget her, not when she's burning in his veins and searing his soul. and one night, when he's choking on the clean air of his apartment, he knows that he can't try to escape her anymore.

he comes home and finds her waiting, and for once the fire isn't inside him, just outside.

_(a boy with eyes like ice and golden hair like sunlight and bones like skyscrapers and skin like desert sand is found dead of a heroin overdose in the same alley where a girl had died exactly a year before of the same cause. they call it a tragedy. they have no idea.)_

fin.


End file.
